Email or Electronic Mail

What used to be unique – sending an email message – and reserved for universities, physicians and corporations – has become as common as the air we breath.

Seems everyone has access to email and thinking of our world without it does make one wonder how we would communicate with one another?

Would we return to the phone? Would we eat up our cell minutes chatting away about every little thing like we used to?

How would we continue to market to customers and prospects without the ability to send a nifty piece of communications electronically? Would we return to snail mail? Would the Post Office need to reopen up some of its closed facilities?

Perhaps we’d become more dependent upon one-on-one messaging and chatting through Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and other social media platforms.

Some say text messaging will erase the need for electronic mail. Others feel email is stronger than ever and will continue to grow.

Who knows? As long as we have email, who cares?

The History of Email

What is interesting is to see the evolution of a technology like an email, something we take for granted. The early email pioneers started way back in 1961.

That’s over 50 years ago!

Over the next 20 years, various people slowly chipped away until the process of email process was fully formed and adopted.

Got Mail? Got Birthday!

August 30th of 2012 will mark the 30th birthday of the copyright for the process we refer to as “Email”. It would have been a year older, but it tookDr. V. A. Shiva Ayyadurai over a year to explain the concept to the Copyright office. This is how it goes with new technologies and government agencies.

Lucky for us, Ayyadurai was successful so that today there are over 3.1 billion email accounts.

The following infographic does a great job of explaining how electronic email evolved and its steady growth. What the infographic doesn’t do is explain how sending email through the wires has impacted traditional forms of communications, like old fashion mail. But that’s for another infographic.

While you’re doing that, I’m going to visit one of my Gmail accounts. I’m expecting an email from a friend regarding lunch next week.

To find out more about Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai’s experiences, you’ll need to visit Ayyadurai’s website, which is also the source of this infographic.

Sheila Hibbard takes the fluff, hype and confusion out of marketing and social media. She provides small business owners with straight forward, no nonsense marketing guidance and techniques that produce results based on her 35 plus years in advertising, communications, research, strategic planning and social media. Author of Marketing Online Made Simple - WHO.